The Daily Stoic - Professor Sarah Churchwell on Genius, Big Dreams and F. Scott Fitzgerald

Episode Date: January 25, 2023

Ryan speaks with Sarah Churchwell about her book Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby, the complicated figure of F. Scott Fitzgerald, how The Great Gatsby’s celebration of mad dreamers who chase the American Dream informs our pursuit of the same ideal today, and more.Sarah Churchwell is professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. Her work focuses on 20th- and 21st-century American literature and cultural history, especially the 1920s and 1930s, including four books: The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, Behold America: A History of America First and the American Dream, The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells, and the aforementioned Careless People. She has written for numerous publications, including The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator, the New Statesman, The Guardian and The Observer. Saraha was also a judge for the 2014 Man Booker Prize, the 2017 Baillie Gifford Prize, and the 2019 Sunday Times Short Story Prize. In April 2021, she was long listed for the Orwell Prize for Journalism.✉️  Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a Meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating, and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message

from one of our sponsors. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stoke Podcast. I was going through some boxes upstairs at my house and I found something my parents had emailed me. It says AP US History honors 11 essay cover sheet. So apparently I wrote an essay February 5th, 2004. My English teacher was Miss Cars, who I loved. I would love to reconnect with if anyone happens to know Miss Jesslyn cars from Granite Bay, California. Anyways, I wrote this essay,

and not only did I find the essay, but I found this sheet, and I remembered it, as soon as I saw it, we'd been asked to write an essay. The prompt was, analyze how and why the Great Gatsby is an exploration of the American dream as it exists in a corrupt period. And I love the great Gatsby. I'm looking at my copy right here.

And anyways, I wrote the essay, and I'll read you the intro. She typed up my essay, and she taught it to the class, which was, I think my first, I wouldn't say success is right, but the first time anyone was like, hey, you might be good at this. I said, the 1920s open display of legal activity in acceptance of sin is the epitome of corruption. It is in this atmosphere as portrayed in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby that eventually became incompatible with the American dream. The loss of morality

signaled the death of hope and idealism in the heart of man. No longer did the public search for satisfaction instead they embraced the immediate gratification of alcohol and sex. Everyone that is except for J. Gatsby, a disillusioned man still clinging to his past. The novel makes it clear that not only had the American dream changed in the past few hundred years,

but that it, but died. Anyways, she says, the writer has established a confident voice and demonstrates, at least in the introduction, a command of language and critical thinking. She says, what does the writer of our model do? First, I am very aware of his helpful transitions. They neither insult or confuse. Anyways, I don't want of his helpful transitions. They neither insult or confuse. Anyways, I don't wanna read you this whole thing, it's certainly sound ridiculous.

Like, look at the spiral that I threw in the big game or something, but it was, I don't know. This is the first time that I'd ever been recognized for basically anything as a thinker or a writer. And it inspired my, I'd always loved books. And then I think there was some part that I took from this and then later a recommendation that Ms. Carzot for me that made me think, maybe I could do this.

Maybe there's something here. Maybe I don't have to be a regular person with a nine to five job. And it's funny. I found another essay in that same pile that I wrote about Gandhi. And as it happened at that very moment, I was writing about Gandhi for the new book. So anyways, a weird full circle moment that ties into today's guest. As soon as I saw this, I decided to reach out to someone who'd written one of my favorite books about F. Scott Fitzgerald and the great Gatsby, and to have her on the podcast.

Sarah Churchwell wrote this amazing book called Careless People, Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great cats. And it's just an absolutely incredible book. She's a professor of American literature and public understanding at the University of London in the UK. She's an expert in 20th and 21st century American literature and cultural history, especially the 20s and 30s. She was a judge for the 2014 man booker prize,

2016 Bailey Gifford Prize, and the 2019 Sunday Times Prize. She's written a book on Marilyn Monroe. She's written a book about the American Dream and a book about Gone with the Wind, which I'm looking forward to reading and we'll probably have her back on the podcast. I absolutely love Gatsby. I'm writing about Gatsby in the Justice book. I've written about him. I've written about Fitzgerald, many, many times on the podcast. The crack up is an incredible book that I would also recommend. A very sad, haunting memoir about discipline.

And let's say, Destiny also. Thank you to Professor Churchill for coming on the podcast. Thank you to Miss Cars for influencing me. And I think you're going to be surprised at how stoic this episode is. And hopefully my love and Admiration for one of the great novels of all time shines through here enjoy this conversation about F Scott Fitzgerald The great Gatsby with the one and only Sarah churchwell who can follow on Twitter at Sarah churchwell Hi, I'm David Brown the host of of Wunderree's podcast business wars.

And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or because I loved your book. I thought it was amazing. I was trying to find my copy of, here's your book. I was trying to find my copy of the crack up, which I could not find. But I found my copy of the Gatsby from high school, which I've put a few miles on. And then I found one of my favorite novels, which is

Bud Schuylberg's book that disenchanted about Eskuff Fitzgerald. But what I took from your book and what I've always taken from Fitzgerald was so interesting, is that he's this guy that writes with this amazing kind of self-awareness, like he's so aware of what his issues are, his flaws are, human nature, et cetera, and then seem to be utterly powerless to do anything about them or with this self-awareness. Well, I think that's fair, but I think it also focuses on the negative

in a way that he did, but also in a way that he did, and, but also in a way that his reputation, his pastime's reputation has encouraged us to do in a way that it's a little bit counterintuitive because we know he's like this, you know, laud at writer and he's, you know, one of the great American, you know, the great American novelist and the canon and everything. And yet, for all of the credit and praise that we give him, and especially for Gatsby, there's this way in which people still talk about Fitzgerald as a failure. There's this fundamental way in people are like, but you know, but you know, all these character flaws and whatever. And it's like, but with other great writers, it's like he was a great writer.

Oh, and he had character flaws. Like, maybe we need to make sense of that. And with Fitzgerald, it's like, you know, well, he was a great writer, but oh my God, the character flaws, and it just seems to always kind of overcome our idea of him. And so yes, I think he was very aware of his shortcomings and that was part of what he brought to his art. I think he was incredibly sensitive. I always think, and that is like a kind of, you know,

easily bruised way. But I mean, the way that But I mean the way that he talked, the way that he describes Gatsby at the beginning of the novel as being like a human Giger counter who could register impressions from everybody and everywhere. And I think that was his great gift. And as, you know, as Bill Klee-Shea has it, you know, your great gift is, you know, your greatest strength is often, you know, your version of your greatest failing as well. So I think he was also, I guess he was intensely aware of his failings, but he was intensely aware

of his genius too. He knew it. Yes. And I think our story about him should allow for both, because he knew both. Well, yeah, that's an interesting point because it's not like we made up this idea that he was this failure. He kind of saw himself that way.

And maybe what both reactions are rooted in is not objectively what he did or didn't accomplish. It's that he could have done so much more. And so there's this kind of bitter sweetness to his story in which he's like, indisputably the greatest novelist of the 20th century. And yet, he dies so young, he's not fully appreciated in his time. But I think even he would have readily admitted that he left a lot on the table that he could have written but didn't. Oh, absolutely, right? So the unfulfilled potential is heartbreaking, right?

He's like an athlete, a great athlete that gets struck down in their prime. Absolutely. So exactly. So here's a man who, as you say, is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century, if not the greatest in some people's estimation. And that is, that reputation is based solely on two novels, basically. I mean, some people will argue that the unfinished last tycoon is part of it. Very few people will argue that the sight of paradise are beautiful and damned to have much to do with that at all. So it fundamentally rests on two novels and some

would say on one, you know, on the one masterpiece that is Gatsby. So absolutely, the sense of unfinished potential and not only was that something that he was very aware of, you know, that happened during his life, as you say, and that he was very aware of, you know, that happened during his life, as you say, and that he was very aware of. But it's actually something I've written about in my scholarship about him, is that dog Tim, even from the beginning, from the reception of this side of Paradise,

from the moment that he entered into the public, you know, domain, all of his critics were like, so much potential, but will he live up to it? And by the time he was 24, they were accusing him of not having lived up to his potential. And he was like, you know, give me a break. So Gatsby was really a conscious effort to live up to his potential. And he was like, they keep telling me,

so he was 28 when he wrote Gatsby, which is also his worth bearing in mind. 28 years old to write that masterpiece. And he'd been working publishing at that point for eight years and at a huge, you huge, at a fast tilt, he was just prolific and pouring stuff out. And all of that time they kept saying, no, but will he fulfill his potential?

But will it, at some point he was like, my God, what do I have to do to make you think? I fulfilled my potential. And so he writes, you know, Gatsby. And for me, I am reluctant to, it's easy to psychologize Fitzgerald and people like to do it. And I try to resist the temptation as much as possible. But I think it is important that we recognize

that he pinned so much personal hope and ambition and desire and sense of his self worth as an artist on Gatsby. And it's comparative failure devastated him. And in my view, it really precipitated his spiral. He had a drinking problem to begin with for sure. He had, you know, the problems with focus and with choosing between whether to be popular or to be artistic, that defined a lot of his output. But with Gadsby, he made this choice that he was going to write a masterpiece and then it was met with Baffelman.

And that I think he lost a lot of his self-confidence and a lot of his momentum at that point. Yeah, there's probably some similarities between him and someone like John Kennedy Tool, although Fitzgerald gets so much more validation in respect in his time. But yeah, you produce this heartbreaking work of staggering genius. And you know that it's there. And then the public basically gas lights you about it.

Your editor doesn't fully understand. The public doesn't appreciate it. It would be if you were trying to write something, to prove something to people, or you needed something from the audience, it just makes you so incredibly vulnerable, and it can dash your hopes to pieces, because the world is fundamentally indifferent

to what you needed to get out of, like what you needed from the public when you made this thing. Absolutely. And to go back to that point at the beginning, that aspect to which, if we see him as that Geiger counter that he describes Gadsby as, that means he's unbelievably sensitive to criticism as well as to praise. And so he could fall apart when, and as he did after that, I mean, I think he really was devastated. He was devastated that even the smartest people that he knew,

the people whose critical wisdom he trusted the most didn't get it either. And that includes H. L. Mankin, Edmund Wilson, the great critics of the day who were also his friends. And he wrote this famous letter to Edmund Wilson, you know, who's a close friend of his saying, none of the reviews, not even the most positive, has any idea what this book is about. So he just knew from the beginning that they just had no idea what he was doing.

I'm actually going further and I'll have to send you this essay when I finished it. I'm doing actually a couple. I think we've totally misread the novel. You heard me first. I think we got it wrong. And I have a theory. I think if you actually go back and look at what the reviews said, they talked about the stuff that we talk about around what we would call the American dream. No, he didn't. They didn't use that phrase because it wasn't a catch phrase yet. But they talk about the corruption of America by the rich. They talk about the spiritual dreams of America and the way in which the oligarchy in Long Island has, you know, kind of, you know, made America too materialistic. So they're basically talking about the same set of ideas.

And he writes these frustrated pissed off letters that say nobody has any idea what this novel is about, which to me means that he doesn't think it's really about the American dream in any meaningful sense. What did you think it's about that? Well I have to finish the essay first. I will I do know the answer but I'm not going to say it yet but I think that I think that he was responding to very specific charges and I will say broadly I think he was responding to very specific charges. And I will say broadly, I think he was responding to specific charges that Wilson had famously brought in an essay in 1922, that he didn't have an aesthetic theory

and that he didn't have anything to say. And I think it's a much more conscious, it's a novel about aesthetics and it's consciously about aesthetics. Well, it's funny, I was going through some pictures. But I'm a geek, though that's what I think. No, no, that's really interesting. It was funny, I was going through some kick. That's what I think. But I'm a geek, so that's what I think. No, no, that's really interesting. It was funny, I was going through some papers.

My parents sent me this big tub of stuff from my house when I was a kid. And I found this essay that I'd written in high school about Gatsby, which was largely about the American dream. As sort of teenage kids are prompted to think about the book at this time. Of course, sometimes. Yeah, but what struck me is what I had liked about Gatsby was

what we as adults, I tend to see as the sort of hopelessness or like, like, Gatsby believes that you can go back in time, that you can recapture the past. And I think the message of the book as an adult, the jaded cynical version is like, he's wrong to think this. And I wondered if the hopefulness of the book is actually in that idea of, you know, what's that famous quote about how progress

depends on the irrational man, like that the rational person adapts themselves to the world, the irrational person tries to change the world. I wondered if part of the message of Gatsby is actually the celebration of the deranged idealism and hope of Gatsby, and maybe that's what Fitzgerald is saying. And so when when Pete, when the critics saw it as this sort of indictment of that, they were missing the

they were missing the point that he was actually celebrating these virtues in Gatsby a little bit. Absolutely. I think look, it's a room. He has a fundamentally romantic war. He fits Cheryl's has a fundamentally romantic world view. And so does Gatsby. And the romantic world view is also a tragic world view. I mean, it's not a sentimental romantic world view, but it is that idea of the grandeur of which we're capable, and that takes this huge leap of imagination,

and there is an idealism built into that, but also a faith in human endeavor and in the human imagination. And absolutely, I think it's a novel about, also when I say it's not about the American dream, I mean, I don't mean it's not about those things. I mean, it's about more than that. And exactly. And so, I think he sees America as emblematic of this, you know, at that famous ending is the Dutch sailors seeing the whole possibility of the imaginative realm that anything could happen in the universe. And of course, he's invoking there, as I'm sure you'll know, and many of our fellow listeners who studied at, at high school and college will also know, he's invoking their Keats' poem on first

looking into Chapman's Homer, the famous scene where the conquistadors see the Pacific for the first time. And he says, they're all struck. And he says, they're silent upon a pecan derien. Right? Just left all struck at your first sight of the Pacific. And this image that you see this new continent for the first time and you look at it and anything is possible and what do you do? You build West egg you build Long Island you build Trump's America Like like that's the trajectory that he's honest like you build Vegas Like you could do anything and you you know you built paradise you know We had paradise and we turned it into parking lot, right? That's the, you know, and so, so that sense that you need the madness of dreamers to have

done something more than to just build Vegas. When there's a purity, like Gatsby is rich and powerful and has access to all of the things in the American dream, but what does he really want? He wants the purity of young love, right? And I think to me, that's what struck me in high school, is that he, you know, Gatsby's not throwing the parties because he likes the parties, right? He's throwing the parties, all of it is for this one person

to do this one thing that everyone else has forgotten about and moved past. And to me, that was, that's kind of the American dream or the dream that Gatsby is talking about, or that Fitzgerald is talking about, just sort of the purity of one love between two people, that the money and the fame and the power, all that stuff is actually irrelevant or a means to an end for Gatsby, what he actually wants is this one thing he can't have.

Yeah, but I don't disagree with that, but I would push that even further and say that I think that in the novel and in Fitzgeralds, again, it kind of romantic conception of what the moral philosophy in the novel is, is that Gadsby's dreams are too big for the world that he inhabits. And so he's constantly looking for a target

for his free-flowing desire, for his ambition, and this huge, all of these possibilities. And he lands on all of the tritest and most inadequate objects of desire that he could. And yes, it's the house and the car, and the parties, it's up there, as you say, he doesn't even like those, but ultimately, Daisy's inadequate too.

And so it's this, and he chooses like the worst part. I mean, they're perfectly nice women out there, and he chooses like the absolute worst, right? So, the idea of her, not what she actually is. Well, and he's, and he's, but he's in search of something commensurate to his capacity for wonder as the famous, you know, as the novel closes. So to me, that's, that's what Fitzgerald's talking about is that we have this capacity for wonder. And can we find something in the world that is commensurate to that? Or can we build something

in the world that is commensurate to that instead of just settling for the obvious things that our society offers us, like pop songs about love. That convinces us that what I really need is a pure love, when in fact, if we're adults we know there's no such thing. And I think part of what Fitzgerald thinks is that gas we should have grown out of that. So yes, he admires him. He admires his devotion, he admires his doggedness,

his irrational or irrational commitment, as you say. But he also recognizes that it's f'dop and that he should have moved on. And that's why Gatsby dies, right? What's interesting too is like, there's probably something in our reception to the novel that's similar to what's happening in the novel, which is you have Gatsby, this sort of big dreaming figure

who's dreams are bigger than reality, as he said. And then there's also Caraway, who's the observer. He's the writer of the book, essentially. But he's also kind of the cynical reality of it all, sort of judging as it goes along. In some cases, superior, in some cases, admiring of Gatsby. And that's kind of the role that the public has taken with the book and with Fitzgerald, and Fitzgerald probably embodies himself too, which is like, we like the Gatsby figures,

but we are more comfortable in the living in the tiny house next door, wondering how unhappy they are, examining their flaws, not trying to do better ourselves, but just to kind of be watching them the way that we watch pop culture now. And like it's this play that's happening in front of us instead of actual real life.

I think so, but I absolutely agree with that. But I also think that we need Nick because we need his ambivalence. We need his sense that this, this push pull and irony that he has. So yeah, as you say, he is cynical in many ways, but he is also romantic in some ways. And he's the only one who can see beyond Gatsby's exterior to the romantic beneath. And, you know, the analogy that I often use when I'm teaching Gatsby is to say if this novel were written today,

and in fact there has been a recent adaptation, not too long ago, within the last 10 years adaptation that did something similar, Gatsby would be a Russian oligarch, right? He would be a Russian oligarch who's made his money in a way that we know is shady by definition, but we don't know specifically what crimes he committed.

But he pops up in the neighborhood and he's a Russian oligarch and so you know the guy is dodgy, but you go to his parties and he abs and every and you think his taste is pretty bad, but wow, he's got a lot of money and everybody wants to be there and you know he's a thug and he's and he's affected, he's pretentious and you can see through all of his pretensions and then the thing that's amazing is to turn out that this man has the soul of an artist. This man is the most sensitive of all of the people around him, and you thought he was just a thug,

but actually he's the idealist, and the people around him are the thugs. Now, and that to me is the turn of the novel, right? And you need care away to see that because you have to have that extra set of eyes to take you through that turn so that Gatsby's greatness is ironic. That he is great.

He's also very much not great. He's Todry, he's a Todry Shomen, the great Gatsby. You know, come up and see the great Gatsby and he's also Gatsby. And he's also kind of great. No, that's a fascinating point because our relationship with prohibition has so fundamentally changed. We now see them as heroic, infamous, interesting characters who were fighting something that

was fundamentally unjust. It's hard for us to see what role in society Gatsby was playing at that time. And Olegarc immediately brings up the sort of negative connotation and the judgment that Fitzgerald was playing with at the time, that the effect is just not as potent now. It's speaking of Schubert, it's like, when you read what makes Sammy run, now you're like, wait, he's supposed to be the bad guy. Like, you know, like, isn't that how everyone is? You know, you, and you're also just even missing the subtle anti-Semitism that the book is playing

with because that's not the kind of anti-Semitism that we're worried about today. Exactly. Exactly. And so, Exhaust, I have morals have fallen so far. Yeah. We think their bad guys are kind of fine. Yes. And so, yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And the other analogy besides oligarch is, you know, and to go back to the point about prohibition, yeah, we've romanticized it, but it was illegal.

So, you know, he's effectively a drug dealer, right? To all intents and purposes. So he's a drug dealer in a society. It's like that, you know, you do it set it in the 80s and he's a Coke dealer and everybody is doing Coke and everybody likes to go to his parties because you get absolutely the best Colombian Coke in going.

But would you really want to run away with him and marry him? You know, and then Daisy becomes, Daisy becomes, you understand Daisy's resistance better when it becomes clear that he is a bootleger, we kind of shrug off being a bootleger. But it is like saying, you know the guy you're having in a pharaoh with is actually a Coke dealer. And would you actually run off with that guy? You become a different person if you do that.

So is Scarface and the great Gatsby essentially the same story? Uh-huh, absolutely. You know, we forget how I think we forget how much Gatsby is a gangster story and how much it is because it's so poetic and because it's so romantic and we're not used to lyrical gangster stories. We expect them to be hard boiled. We expect them to sound like Hemingway not like Fashorel But this is this is absolutely a gangster story and and it is you know

He was writing just he's actually again as always Fashorel just so ahead of his time Just as the mania for gangster stories is about to take hold in America So you know, Dashal Hammett starts writing, you know red harvest comes out in 1929, right? And then you get the the early film noir in the early 1930s as as you know, Dashal Hammett starts writing, you know, Red Harvest comes out in 1929, right? And then you get the early film noir in the early 1930s as, you know, you get Scarface and, but you also get, you know, the early filming of the multi, you know, the multi-swalking is later, but you know what I mean? There is an early film, you know, then the early Hammett stuff that gets done, even the

Thin Man, which is 34. So a lot of that stuff is coming out, Walthus show, the still alive, while he's still writing, while he's in and out of Hollywood. And so, I often think that the 1949 film version of Gatsby Alonlade, Black and White version, which you can get on YouTube, I don't know if you've seen it,

is absolutely bonkers, right? It bears very, very little resemblance to the novel. And the ending is insane. But there's one thing that gets right. And I think in an interesting way, first of all, Cass Allen Lab, the kind of iconic gangster of his day, of the 40s, so that instantly when the audience sees him, they think gangster. So they know

God's visa gangster. It's, you know, they cast him very much to type and use his type cast for the purposes of the story. And it opens with a montage of like gangster shots in the 20s. Because remember in 1949, you have an audience that remembers prohibition if they're adults. And they don't show it as glamorous parties. They show it as shoots out, shoots out in cars. It's a propone style story. Is this thing all?

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whatever you get your podcast. Hey, prime members, you can listen early and app-free on Amazon music. Download the Amazon music app today. Yeah, that's so interesting. You have the other gangster in the book that I'm fascinated with and I wrote about him. I did this book conspiracy about Peter Tiel and his attempt to destroy Gokker a few years ago.

And I opened the book with one of my favorite sections in Gatsby, which is when Gatsby meets Mayor Wolfshime, and he's thinking about the 19, 19 world series. And he says, this is amazing line. He goes, I thought of this as something that had simply happened. The idea that a singular person was responsible for it, you know, it had never occurred to him. And I think about that all the time.

We think about so much of what happens in the world, whether we're talking about civil rights or a world war breaking out, or somebody inventing something. We think about the things that happened to us in life as things that simply happen. The idea that there's these singular figures, these dreamers who can transform the world

through their greed or their average or their earnestness or their desire to prove something to someone. To me, that's one of the most remarkable scenes of the book that he's like, oh wait, this is the guy. The news isn't this show that's happening. There are real people behind the things that shape our lives.

Absolutely. And I think it's that final phrase there that for me puts the finger on it, which is that, and I love that bit too, or Nick, his mind is blown at the idea that a single person playing with the fate of a nation, right, that a single person could do this. And of course, because another one of the themes of the novel that we haven't really touched on, although it relates to the point about, about, you know, you need these irrational dreams to do something big, is that it is about the will to power.

It is, you know, it is a fundamentally niche in idea and it's fundamentally about human agency and what can humans make happen? And as you say, how can we shape the world? And how can we shape destiny? And how can we shape our society? And what happens when those very, very big dreams go wrong? And what happens when, again, when your world is inadequate

to your very big dreams, do you start, is that in itself corrupting? Does that in itself mean that you start to make, you know, that you start to do bad things just to do something? Just to, you know, there's a bit in, oh God, what's it in, I should remember, is it might be in the rich boy? I'll find, I'll have to find it in email too

because it irritates me that I can't remember where it is. But it's definitely infesturral somewhere, and it's an early-fissurral, and basically he says, maybe it's in Dallarimple goes wrong. Anyway, he says that because he couldn't be a great man, he decided to be a criminal because it was the next best thing, right? And so I think it is in Dallarimple goes wrong.

And it's basically this conscious choice to say, look, I want to do something great. And if it can't be world building, I'll destroy it. And again, and that's very, if I'm remembering rightly where that is, it's 1990, 1919. It's one of his very first public choice. He sees that very, very clearly from the beginning. And that's the choice that God's being makes, too, is it? It's not just people always think, if I can't get Daisy, he always think his choices. If I can't get Daisy, honestly, I'll get her dishonestly. But I think it's bigger. It's I'm going to make my mark. And if I can't

do it, honestly, I'll do it dishonestly. Yes. Yes. He's a he has some vision of himself as a great man. And he needs to find some confirmation in that, it's either having Daisy, it's being rich, honestly, dishonestly, it doesn't matter. You have the great quote from Mark Twain in the book that flips that. He says, you know, make his quote, he's talking about Jay Gouldery,

he says, you know, make his much money as you can, honestly, if you must, right? Exactly. It's faster and easier, and you can make a bigger mark by breaking the rules, cheating the system, doing the wrong thing. Precisely. Yeah.

Well, that's what I was fascinated by with Peter too. It was fascinated and horrified as you have this guy who, you know, early in his career, he's outed by this website. The Adam is gay and he finds this to be this traumatic painful moment. And we don't have to judge whether it was or it wasn't. That's what it was to him. And it sets in motion this series of events that leads to, you know, a stolen sex tape and a lawsuit. The public is following this story as it happens,

thinking that it is one thing. And then it's only after this $100 million verdict comes in and a media outlet is basically wiped off the face of the earth, that it turns out there was a guy behind it. There was the gangster or the oligarch behind it who was doing it for some reason, that there was the public facing reason,

and then there's the real reason underneath, the wanting to make a mark, the will to power, the needing to prove something to someone. And yeah, the world is shaped by those events. This is why people run for power, run for president. This is why people buy social networks that they don't need. You know, like there's some sort of deep-seated thing. Yeah, right.

There's something that they're trying to prove to someone. I mean, you want to get really Gatsby-esque. There's, I don't know if you saw this, but in the Twitter lawsuit with Elon Musk, one of the texts is from his ex-wife sending him a message talking about how upset she is about the political correctness and censorship on Twitter, right? Like there's always the reason, and then there's the deep-seated, you know, the, well, Daisy wants me to do it, reason.

Yeah. No, exactly, exactly. know that what Daisy wants me to do at reason. Yeah. No, exactly, exactly. And I think, you know, if it's Gerald was always fascinated by those sorts of figures and those sorts of stories, I mean, that's what the last tycoon is about too, that those people went to Hollywood in the 30s. And that's partly why he turns his attention to them, because those are the world builders at that time. And he was absolutely fascinated by the way in which he wasn't interested in geopolitics and then they kind of, you know, I don't know what the right word is,

but in an activist sense, he was much more politically aware than people think he was. And his correspondence makes that clear. He attended Communist parties. I mean, Communist party meetings. I mean, Communist parties. He would have gone to camp. He would have gone to camp.

He would have brought the champagne. He absolutely would have brought the champagne. Champagne Socialist to the end. So it's to Cheryl to a tee. But this side of Paradise has a lot about socialism in it. And Amary Blaine's flirtation, his alter ego's flirtation with socialism in it. He was certainly politically aware and, and he gave, I talk about this in my book, but he gave a really remarkable interview in 1926 with the New Yorker, where he basically predicted

World War II. And he, you know, and it just, he was very, very aware, right? And so this idea that he was an apolitical figure is ignorant and foolish. But he was interested in where politics meets culture. He was interested in where politics meets art because art and culture were where his heart was. And so that's why I think he loved that idea

of the last tycoon because you could have that, I mean, that's the title, right? The last tycoon. And there he is. And you can have this power and this world building influence, but what kind of person are you? And what happens when a romantic gets in that position?

That's what he was, Stelkes didn't interest him as much, but he has a note, I absolutely love this. And I think it's just in his notebooks, but he jotted down when he walked past Rockefeller Center not long before he died. And it's the words to the effect of to think all this was just built by a racketeer. Yes.

So you know, Rockefeller's a racketeer. He knew they were all racketeers. He knew that they were all, you know, and when at the end of Gatsby, I students always read this bit wrong. So I'm always trotting this out to try to make it clear to them. That when Gatsby's father, when Henry Gats comes back for the funeral, and he says, if he'd lived, he would have been a great man.

He would have a man like James J. Hill. He would have built the country, right? And you have to know that James J. Hill was a racketeer. You have to know that he was a Peter Teal kind of a figure. He was a Neal on Musk kind of a figure. He was a household named billionaire who destroyed everything and I'm not slandering Musk or Teal but was accused of murder. So, Hill was widely assumed that he had committed homicide in part of his railroad battles

with Haramon. And the people are like, oh, he would have been a great man like James H. Hill. I'm like, no, no, that's not a good thing. It's like saying, if he'd lived, he would have been a great man like Trump, or he would have been a great man like Rupert Murdoch, or he would have been a great man like Elon Musk.

You have to hear the deep deep irony in that. Yeah, it's interesting how laundered these things become not that long after the fact that I'm writing a little bit about Truman now and he gave this speech on the floor of the Senate where he's basically castigating the Carnegie libraries. He's like, these things are soaked in blood. Exactly. And these ideas now we see these industrialists as these sort of heroes or these sort of

in Randian figures where they're stripped of the violence inherent in what was required to do that even Gatsby, right? He's already the made man. We're not seeing the gun fights with the police or the we're not seeing the violence that would have been inherent in becoming that rich and that successful at such a fundamentally illegal thing. Absolutely. And all we have in the novel to remind us of that is Nick Seng during the confrontation scene at the plaza. He says that Nick says that Gatsby has this extraordinary look on his face and it takes

him a minute to identify it. And then he says, then I realized what it was. He looked as if he'd killed a man. Yes. So there's this hint of murderousness or it's explicit, but this implication of murderousness that Nick suddenly recognizes. But exactly, right? So what they were doing, right? The philanthropic project, building Rockefeller Center, building universities, building libraries, you know, creating universities, building libraries, creating foundations, was precisely to whitewash their reputations. And it worked.

So the point where 100 years later, most people don't realize, as you say, that they were thugs. And then they went, and in my view, I'll get even more political if you want to, but in my view, by definition, anybody who becomes a billionaire has done, has, you don't become a billionaire, honestly., you don't become a billionaire honestly. You just don't. You've done something unethical at a minimum.

You've at least exploited the hell out of your workers and refused to pay them and not given them holiday and made them pee in a jar. You've at least behaved in very, very bad objectionable ways in order to become a billionaire in the first place. And then we admire them when they give some of the money back. And I'm like, well, how about you become a billionaire in the first place. And then we admire them when they give some of the money back. And I'm like, well, how about you know, become a billionaire in the first place? You know, Fitzgerald talks a lot about virtue, right? And at one point, it's a beginning of

being a moralist. Yeah. At the beginning of, I mean, yeah, at the beginning of, at the beginning of Gatsby, he said something like one suspects, one always suspects themselves of at least one of the cardinal virtues. He talks about honesty, but what you have to be to be a Gatsby and Olegarker billionaire is to fundamentally reject the virtue of temperance or discipline. You fundamentally have to give yourself over to a kind of greed or an inability to be satisfied, which is at the core of who Gatsby was. Ironically, also the core of who Fitzgerald was in a more pedestrian sense, right?

There was never enough pleasure or alcohol or fun or money for him, but at a much more human level, not at the sort of Shakespearean or Gatsby-esque level. Yes, although I'm going to defend Fitzgerald again and point out that all of the work that he did mitigates against that. So he sat down and he wrote this masterpiece. He wrote, and yeah, Tender took him nine years to do. He wrote an enormous number of stories He wrote he was writing all of the time and not all of its good

It's uneven and sometimes he was drinking and sometimes he was drinking when he was writing and sometimes he was hungover when he was writing And and that was you know and and his alcoholism was a real problem but I don't think his egotism was a problem in that sense He had a fundamental discipline when it came to his art And he and he had an almost religious feeling about his obligation to it. He also had a religious feeling of his failure to live up to that obligation. But he also, he was absolutely a moralist at heart. And he always said, he said more than once, and he got pissed off at Hemingway.

It was through that after the Sinoz of Kilimanjaro kind of exchange when Hemingway lied about him and slammed him and introduced him basically in print in 1936 in Esquire. And Fitzgerald wrote him a really angry letter, particularly for Fitzgerald, who is a very forgiving guy, actually. Well, he held a grudge in a different way, but he could be a very, very magnanimous person, and he wrote this, and often was. He wrote this letter to Hemingway that said, lay off me in print, and stopped saying that I'm interested in riches, because this is the famous line from the snows of Kilimanjaro when he says he thought of Port Julian, and then his name gets changed. He thought of Port Scott Fitzgerald, and then his name gets changed to he thought poor scoffer Sherald and then his name gets gets changed to Julian and later

in later versions and he says and his fascination with the rich. And Fischel Roderman said, riches have never fascinated me only what can be done with them right? He understood that it speaking of agency as we were earlier that that that's what money is for. He's interested in what money creates. He's not interested in money for its own sake. And he was never interested in the rich because they were rich. He was interested in rich people who did interesting things. And that was like Gerald and Sarah Murphy, who were artists and painters and created this

beautiful world. He knew lots of rich crafts people who he didn't give the time of day to. That's true. Have you, I know your work on sort of novelists and the writing process. Have you read any of Stephen Pressfield stuff? Do you know who he is? So he wrote this great novel.

He wrote the Legend of Bagger Vance. He wrote this book, the Gates of Fire, which is one of the most sort of popular books about the Spartans. Anyways, he's written these great novels, but he also wrote this book called The War of Art, which is incredibly popular with creative people, so millions of copies.

But it might be worth thinking about as you study Fitzgerald, because to me, so the basic premise of The War of Art is that we all have this creative calling, this destiny, or every writer or artist does. And we sit down to do it, and the reason we don't do it is there's this thing between us and that, which he calls the resistance. And that resistance is this sort of inner demon

that we're all battling with. And to me Fitzgerald is the quintessential example of somebody who fights their whole life against the resistance. You have a beautiful passage in the book where he's talking about like how he, what he had to show for like three years work. He had like lots of fun parties, lots of memories, lots of things, and then like a couple short stories.

And Fitzgerald just strikes me as, you know, a cautionary beautiful, sometimes triumphant, sometimes defeated example of someone who's battling with the capital R resistance, this thing that dogs all creative people that prevents us from putting our butt in the chair when we should or creates distractions, self-doubt, makes us incredibly sensitive to what other people say. Just all the noise or friction that gets between us and fully putting the gift on the page. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And I think that Fitzgerald would have responded very

probably pretty openly to that. I think he absolutely would have recognized himself in that. I mean, he calls Dick Diver a spoiled priest in tender, and people always often use that phrase to describe his share of as well. And by spoiled, he doesn't mean indulged. He means corrupted. He means ruined, yeah. And that he has the kind of spirit of a spoiled priest

that he let himself go to waste, that he let himself go to rot that he let himself go to rot. Um, and, and that was what ate away at him. Yeah. Oh, man, it's so haunting. Um, so did you have a chance to read the adjuster? I'm sure you'd already read it. Oh, I know. Well, yeah. Okay.

That's my favorite F Scott Fitzgerald story. And I was just, I was just writing about it recently because it's your stick. Oh, you have to tell me why it's your favorite. You're literally the first person I've ever heard say it's their favorite. I don't, I don't know why it have to tell me why it's your favorite. You're literally the first person I've ever heard say it's their favorite. I don't know why it struck me. It's so beautiful. So I ended up connecting it to, there's a famous story that Maxwell Perkins tells when

he's a young man and his friend is drowning. And he swims away sort of in self-interest trying to get free and then decides, no, he has to go back. And he says, the lesson I took from this is to never refuse a responsibility, right? And to me, the story of the adjuster, although it's kind of this weird, trippy, strange, it's not, I wouldn't say it's a particularly well written story. It seems like something, he threw out to make it in a newspaper.

But the core message to me is about this sort of childish immature woman who comes face to face with responsibility. And she gets delivered this lesson, which I think is so beautiful. She says, well, I want to stay warm by the fire. And he says, no, like we have to make the fire. Like people, people are warmed by us. I don't know. I just have always taken it as a really interesting sort of lesson or moral take on what it means to become an adult, to become responsible. That's also kind of the battle of Fitzgerald's life. He's this incredibly talented person who basically spends a lot of his life as a man child and then at the end

He's responsible for his daughter and his wife and his health is failing and he he realizes that there's not much left time on his gift And he's forced to become responsible. I Mean I would again, I don't disagree, but I would just shade it slightly, don't agree again. And it's just, well, it's just my take for, you know, it's, but is that is that I think he was always responsible, but I, but I, but in a different way, but I think he always felt, he always felt that sense of responsibility. And he took accountability. He was not somebody who evaded the consequences of his own choices. And he always knew that he was responsible for his family's well-being. And the friction between him and Zelda was often about his sense that she was the one who was,

you know, the selfish wife as in the adjuster, and that he had to take on all of the burdens. One of the things that's interesting about reading the adjusters that it's written in 1925, but in many ways it kind of weirdly, uncannily, prophesized, they'll just break down five years later. And the sense that the selfish woman is, you know, and so there's a wish fulfillment here. I think one way of reading the story is, is what would happen if the selfish woman stepped up and took responsibility to. Yes. Certainly Fitzgerald had to take more responsibility

as time went on because he couldn't make the money as easily. And so the accountability weighed heavier and heavier and heavier on his shoulders. And that sense of responsibility that he was enthusiastic about in youth that he took, that became a burden in adulthood is in his full maturity is where I completely agree with you. But I don't think he was never really, he was irresponsible in the sense that he drank

too much and like, you know, but he paid his bills and he, you know, one of the things interesting, you know, you talk about Perkins and stuff, you know, his correspondence with Perkins, the business correspondence with Perkins is fascinating from this angle. Wouldn't be interesting to anybody except the most diehard for show geeks. But he refused to let Perkins was trying to pay him in advance. The idea of an advance was a new thing. Sure. And Perkins kept offering him in advance.

And if he was like, no, I don't think I should do that. I don't think we should do it like that. And then he ended up kind of needing advances all of the time, right? So, but he considered it alone. And he was absolutely scrupulous about keeping track of how much he owed, paying it back, and constantly writing Perkins and saying,

how much do I owe you? I hear so I'm gonna pay you back, here's so I'm gonna do it. So he was not the guy who was like, oh, lend me another hundred bucks, and then I'm gonna go blow it on a party, and then I'm gonna go dip into somebody else's pocket. He kept a ledger, he was absolutely scrupulous about that.

So he had this real sense of, he just was always outspending what he earned. So he was profligate in that sense, he was a waste role in that sense, but not in the sense that he didn't, he didn't think that he owed it back to anybody. And that's one of the things I love about Babylon revisited and indeed about many of his great late stories

is this sense that those stories are all about the fact that debts always come due at some point. Moral debts, artistic debts, personal debts, you're going to have to pay your debts. And that this idea of a promissory note that will get redeemed, even that metaphor, he uses that metaphor of the promissory note more than once in his fiction. And then it comes back again and again and again that you took this promissory note

out on life and life comes and makes you pay back that debt. And that's fundamentally how he saw it, I think. Yeah, when you're talking about self-awareness earlier, that is what's so interesting about Fitzgerald. There's different kinds of addicts, right? There's the addict who, when you sit them down at the intervention, they're like, what are you talking about, right? Like I didn't do all that. And then if you had sat, F's got Fitzgerald down for an intervention. He would have been well aware of everything he'd ever done wrong.

He would have felt profoundly guilty about all of it. You know, he would have known the debts or troubles that he caused for people. He had this sense. So I think that's, it's an interesting notion of responsibility, right? There's, there is the sense that he's aware of what he should be doing and aware that he's not always doing it. He's just like all of us, not fully able to be the sort of moral person or the responsible person that he wants to be for a variety of reasons.

Cultural reasons, his marriage, his addictions, the curse of his profession, the reality of making a living, all these things kind of get in the way of who I think he would like to be. And he probably fantasizes, I think, like, if he had family money, all of this would be easier, right? Like, he wouldn't be as... Of course. He spends time around these people who just seem to have this kind of effortless life that is just so far from his experience.

I think that is also partly his fascination with the rich. He just goes, you know, if I had a famous name or if I had done this or that, I wouldn't, I wouldn't be in the pain or distress that I am in. I wouldn't, I wouldn't be, I could be the gentleman writer, not whatever I am. Yeah, but that's what the rich boy is about, right? Which is the next great masterpiece after Gatsby and is about You know being destroyed being destroyed by wealth and and by inherited wealth And you know, he and that's based on his friend that little fouler. He watched it really really closely

So his you know his moral intelligence was such that he that he could see how all of these different things could destroy people And you know, I think that yes, I think that he could see how all of these different things could destroy people. And I think that, yes, I think that he is one of those of whom it can truly be said, as Oscar Wilde said, that he could resist anything except temptation. And, but he wasn't tempted sexually, for example, he wasn't particularly unfaithful to Tizaldas, especially given the opportunities and how things played out for them. And it's not just sexual, for example, he wasn't particularly unfaithful to Zeldas, especially given the opportunities and how things played out for them.

But he was tempted by beauty. He was always tempted by the glamour, not the taudery glamour that many people think he was tempted by, but he was tempted by, again, potential. He was tempted by the potential for glamour and by the potential for romance and by the potential for something Extraordinary to happen and he kept wanting to go where it was likely to happen and he was tempted by experience. Yeah, so he he wanted to be where something extraordinary Might take place. Yeah, but again, it's easy to overstate that because there were plenty of times when he stayed home to write the great Gatsby, you know, to write tenders, and to write those 178 stories that he wrote that did not write themselves.

So we can overstate the degree to, because he was such a flamboyant presence when he was at those parties, and because he was, you know, absolutely trolleyed more often than not, and making a spectacle of himself. And he behaved very badly when he was drunk. So the story's become very legendary. So all of that is all very true. But I think he was also somebody who was, you know, you said, you talked earlier about moderation. He was certainly not a moderate guy, Scott Fitzgerald.

He was very much a kind of all or nothing character. And so when he was writing, he was really fully disciplined, and he was really committed to what he was doing. And then he would go on a bender and blow off all of that steam. And then he would pull it, you know, marshal his resources and then focus and do it again. Yeah, I mean, that's the war of art, right?

It's like sitting alone in your room, writing by hand or a party on the French Riviera and that one is more fun than the other. Exactly. I mean, you know, I mean, cold porter or, you know, ruled, you know, no book. Many of us would make the cold porter choice. Well, and, and, you know, we were talking about athletes earlier. He's like an athlete that's cut down in his prime.

He also strikes me as, you know, you watch those old clips of athletes and they're like, they're smoking in the locker room at halftime. They're doing coke or what it like, you know, this wasn't, there wasn't the culture of discipline around the craft at that time because so many of the writers were these like gentlemen, you know, philosopher types or they were, they were these candles that burnt out very quickly.

It wasn't like today where you see it as an elite profession that requires certain habits and skills and practice it. Like he was, you know, he was a product of that time. And that time was, of course, you can drink to black out drunk on a regular consistent basis and and send your kid away to be watched by someone else. And there's no consequences for that. And as you talk a lot about it, at the beginning of the book, you can drive with no seatbelt

at obscene speeds and on roads with no street lights. And you know, there wasn't, they hadn't experienced all the consequences of those things that we today have built up responses to. They were the trial and error and he learned a lot of painful lessons that we benefit from. Absolutely, I think that's absolutely true.

But I also think, he wrote to an old friend, I talked to this in the book too, but an old friend called Ted Paramore who was, they wrote a screenplay together, and there was a lot of friction in working on it, and Paramore wasn't taking Fitzgerald's suggestions. And he got really pissed off, and he wrote Paramore this letter, saying I did not write several best sellers

in 150 high-paid magazine stories with the lack of something like the judgment or discipline of a child. And so he talks about the importance about the importance of discipline is just, and that was his pissed off quick response. I'm like, stop, of course I had discipline, I had to have discipline to do what I did. It's baked in, it's definitional.

And of course he had great judgment, it's baked in. And the thing that, the stereotype of this show that I'm always pushing back against because it just irritates the hell out of me. Is this the story of the inspired amateur that this guy exactly who partied and when it was black out drunk and was all of this stuff and then he sat down and casually tripped and wrote the great thing. He's a pro.

Nope. He was a total pro. One of the things I'll tell you about Gatsby that I was like is that he, I just say he was handwriting and he was handwriting on, on, on ruled paper. And he, he told Perkins as he was writing Gatsby that he reckoned it was about 50,000 words. This was before it was typed. And of course, they didn't have Microsoft Word to tell them what their word count was. He said he thought it was about 50,000 words and it was 48,850 words. And he knew

that because he was a pro. Yeah. Right. He had a sense of how long stuff was, how many days had been in it? What's the normal result of that many days? And he just had that figure to feel. He'd been writing magazine fiction to length for years. So he knew what the lengths were. The same way a journalist, you know, today will know when you've said, you know, I'm, you do journalism, I do a lot of journalism, I know whenever I'm in a thousand word piece, I know whenever I'm in a three thousand word piece, I've just done it so many times, I know what the length is. Yes. And he was a pro. He knew that that was a 50,000 word book. Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah, there's these subtle tells. Well, so the last short story I want to talk to you

about, because it's my favorite, you've read the Four Fists, I imagine, yes. I think that one is such an interesting look at Fitzgerald as the moralist. I love that you love these quirky stories. I know. I know. Yeah, I think there's a bit of a problem with that.

I think his short story stuff is so often dismissive, schlock or stuff done for the money. But I think one, it's a lot of it's super good. What's the one about the crystal bowl? I love that one too. Yeah, the Cucklass bowl. Yes, that one's amazing. Cucklass bowl.

But not only I think are they just objectively good, if you think about, he would be someone who would be popular on social media now. He could, he'd figured out the algorithm, but he was doing something at a level that no one else, like everything else in the media miscraft, and what he was doing was like inspired and amazing. I think the short stories are so good. And if you think about, he's delivering these profound moral lessons to people reading news about murders and all the nonsense of yellow journalism that he was competing with at that

time, it's really impressive. 100%. I think that so many of his story, we always talk about the same five or six stories as if they're the only ones that he wrote. And all anybody talks about his Babylon revisited and, you know, dies palace and, you know, a handful of other ones, right? The last of the bells. And, you know, and I, I agree with you, I think that there are so many neglected gems in his, in his short stories. For me, the ones and even ones that people read, I think they don't get or, I mean, that's rude,

rude. But I feel like they're missing what, to to me makes them so special. So I would say the Diamond is Biggest, the Ritz, which is highly unthologized and people read it. But I feel like, because we haven't talked about this yet, but one of the things that is, to me, is so central to Fitzgerald and is so overlooked today. But at the time, people saw it was very prominent in his reputation, was that he's a satirist and he's funny. And the diamond is big as the rites is A, a satire, but B, and you're much more importantly for today, it's a satire of capitalism. It's a satire of monopoly capitalism, and it's about how American monopoly capitalism

is built on slavery. And that's something that he sees totally clearly. And the story is very explicit about. And it's a mock allegory of the settlements of America. It's a mock allegory of settler colonialism and monopoly capitalism beginning with Fitzpatrick Washington who goes west from Virginia. I mean, it's like he's got, you know, so the, as you can see Fitzpat see, I don't remember his name is,

but it's fits something, fits William Fitzgull Pepper, I can't remember. But anyway, he's Washington is the point. And so it's clearly, it is this allegory of America and about the ways in which all of the article power in America was built through monopoly capitalism. So I think that's such a pertinent story right now, but it just needs to be read on that

axis. But the other one that I love is the swimmers, which is, I think has his best writing about America outside of Gadsby. And the amazing thing about the swimmers is that he published it 10 days before the Wall Street crash of 1929. And it's, again, it basically kind of imagines what will happen if you lose all your money and if it all goes to hell. And it has this wonderful, wonderful, wonderful closing passage, which I won't spoil for you, but which is almost as in Cantertory as the ending of Gatsby about America. And it is just, and I can quote it, but I won't because I'll let you read it for yourself. It's absolutely marvelous.

And that was out of print for a long time, but now you can, you can Google it. You can get it online for free, but it's also in a bunch of collections now. Given that you like the quirky unusual ones, I'll give you a couple of other recommendations of MA. One is called Six of One, which is a kind of a sort of trading places scenario. It's a bet between two rich men about whether they can

take pork. It's a nature nurture bet. So can they take poor kids? Can they take six pork kids, and get them, and will they be the best citizens, or will six rich kids be the best citizens? And each of them has a team of their six kids, and it's like a 20 year bet

to see what will happen to these kids. And again, at the end, he ties it back to America. So it's a social experiment, but he makes it about the meanings of America. And the other one is called either more than a house or more than just a house. And it is also, and it's a kind of allegory of the depression. So that was written after the crash. And it's about a young man who goes through the crash and kind of, and again, what he sees

in America in the early years of the depression and whether America will come through. I like the one about the genius who falls in love with the dancer and then- Head and shoulders. Yeah, she supports him and then she gets injured and then he becomes the trapeze artist. I love that. She becomes the brain. Head and shoulders. Well, I'll tell you a funny story about Head and shoulders, which is that there was

a film version of it. Really? Yeah, his first six stories were adapted into silent films. And they were almost all of them were lost. So the one of them, which was based on the camel's back, which is called Conductor 1492, is available online and you can watch it. But most of them are lost like the 1926 Gatsby. And of course, Girls, Romance was presumed lost.

But I had a PhD student working on these silent films. She actually did a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant job of reconstructing the silent films from all of the kind of paraphernalia that survives around them, all of the journalism, but also there's all kinds of things. It was incredibly creative. And she came to me one day of my office and she was working on her PhD and she said, Sarah, you're not going to believe this, but I think I found something and she was kind

of shaking and she said, I don't know if I've lost my mind or if I've really found this. And she took me through what she was looking at and her logic and I started shaking and I said, yeah, you found it. And she found a course course romance. So there's a, I said, yeah, you found it and she found a chorus girls romance. So there's a, we discovered, we, she discovered it. I just confirmed that she had discovered it. A print of a chorus girls romance, which is the silent film version of head and shoulders

and they have it at MoMA. So if you're in, if you get to New York, go to MoMA and check out a film called a chorus girls romance because it's based on a short stroke by Fitzgerald. But the titles don't say that because the titles dropped off. And so they did. So MoMA didn't realize that they had cataloged it correctly

because they didn't know it because they changed the title and they didn't know it had anything to do with Fitzgerald. So yeah, so if you like heading shoulders, that's fun. Yeah, there's a line at the beginning of that story where he says, I was raised to be a Y child. That any time I asked why someone would answer. And I think about that with my kids all the time. But okay, so I'm sure you have to go.

So I wanted to go back to the four fists really quick. What I love about that story as Fitzgerald of the Morales at the end of the story, and I'm a spoiler for everyone. He basically realizes that, again, talking about capitalism, monopoly capitalism, this guy is set west basically to steal land from a bunch of farmers, ranchers, and realizes that's what's happening. He can sort of give them the information, blow up this deal, or he can screw them over and advance his career.

He has this sort of brilliant rumination where he basically says something like, you know, doing the right thing seems obvious, but it's also fundamentally selfish, right? He's like, because my family will suffer. And I was just interviewing one of the Theranos whistleblowers, and I was telling him about this story because, you know, how do you think about, you think about deciding to do this thing that is almost certainly not going to be rewarded, even though it's totally right, even though in this kid's case,

he wasn't married out of kids, but his parents end up having to mortgage their house to pay for the legal bills for him to bring down what it's just. He's in the documentaries, yeah. Yeah, so I was thinking of that story when I heard his story, and I just think about that all the time. And to me, it's perfectly in captures what Fitzgerald is talking about, which is doing the right thing.

It's complicated. And there has to be kind of a purity to doing it and almost a willful disregard of the consequences that are going to follow from this sort of pursuit of virtue which is abstract in the real world, which is not abstract. Yeah, well, I think that, you know, we were talking about his sense of responsibility, right?

And that tension between yourselfish desires and your sense of responsibility to others is a fundamental theme in Fitzgerald. And that sense, but for him, that sense of responsibility to others in his fiction is often exactly goes beyond your sense of responsibility to your family. Because in a sense, I think you would see that as fundamentally selfish too. It's me and mine. Yeah. But what is your broader responsibility? What is your social responsibility?

And that's one of the reasons that I love the straw I mentioned more than a house, which is more than just a house, which ends with this wonderful, wonderful line that I quote a lot where he says he sees the house as what he is a symbolic house that kind of against stands for, you know, kind of the American experience through the depression. And he or even an allegorical house and he and he says that it represented more than just a house. It was an effort towards some common wheel and an effort that still closely presses against us all or something like that. And that word common wheel, right? And I love the uses of the archaic version there, that

sense of that we have to have some sense of a collective well-being. And what is the nation's role in that? And what is our individual responsibility to contribute to that common wheel? dual responsibility to contribute to that common wheel. And that is, to me, his moral, we can talk about his moral sense, but his moral sense is not just an ethical sense between humans. He had this fundamental, his moral sense was fundamentally connected to principles and values that he saw as American. And that's why it keeps coming back to ideas of America. That's what the common wheel is. Is this utopian American experiment that he felt a profound conviction that, you know,

towards supporting and it comes back again and again and again and is writing. And I think that's partly why I think these kind of glib cliches about the American dream do him such a disservice because he's got a much more complicated and active, iterative, dialogic relationship with ideas of America in his fiction if you read him more closely. And I think he is one of our great, great writers about America in a way that has been totally underappreciated. Yeah, it's like great Gatsby is to the American Dream.

What born in the USA is to the American dream It is what it's about, but you're totally missing the point and it's not it's not for you Ronald Reagan Exactly, exactly I'm gonna make that a bumper circle. This is not for you Ronald Man, well look I loved your book so much and I am endlessly fascinated with Fitzgerald. I want to read your book on Gone With The Wind next and I would love to have you back on because I want to talk about that and best sellers which I'm obviously fascinated with.

I wrote a piece I'm going to send it to you. I wrote this piece about Ask the Dust, which is like one of my favorite novels, and it's path to publication and rediscovery, which I think you might like. Wonderful, I'd love to read it. Thank you so much. All right, well this was awesome.

I appreciate you staying up late for me. Oh no, no, it's not late at all. And appreciate making this time. And for wonderful conversation, my absolute favorite thing in the world, that not with the win book is darker. I'll warn you right now, but hopefully you'll enjoy it too. There's certainly a lot to talk about, I think.

Well, I live in the American South and I'm obsessed with the Civil War. So I know the darkness. Yeah, you do. All right. Amazing. All right, talk to you. Really nice to meet you.

Thanks a lot. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us. And it would really help the show. We appreciate it. And I'll see you next episode. Hey Prime Members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and add free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.